In an attempt to capitalize on the buzz of Christopher Nolan’s “The Odyssey,” Fountain O, an AI film studio, is releasing a 135-minute AI-generated film called “Odysseus: The Fall” using Chinese AI video generator software Kling and Google’s Nano Banana for imagery and core frames. Nolan, who has publicly derided AI slop, spent a quarter of a billion dollars on his film, whereas the AI-generated version cost “mid-five figures.” 

The S&P 500 and Russell 2000 rose yesterday as June producer prices came in softer than expected, while the Nasdaq 100 dropped amid a chip rout. Communications was the best-performing sector, thanks to gains in Alphabet and Meta, while utilities was the worst.

Anthropic is beginning to test the waters ahead of its potential IPO and is starting to set up meetings with investors. An IPO from Anthropic would be a seismic moment for the still relatively nascent AI business. It would be both the pacesetter for the entire industry and a moment when a lot of market value that has drained out of companies on public markets and into private companies like Anthropic will once again become available for investors. 

Investor meetings are a critical part of the IPO process, as bankers sound out demand before the actual roadshow. 

The maker of Claude hitting public markets would be a watershed moment for investors who have been ravenous in their pursuit of exposure to the AI trade. Finally, enough with investing in the picks and shovels, any one of these AI labs going public would be a moment to buy the dang mine. 

It’ll also be a chance for markets to appraise the actual businesses of these companies instead of implicitly doing so based on the pools of red ink on the balance sheets of the businesses that are well and truly disrupted. So far, investors have only had a chance to price in new technological innovations by dumping the shares of the companies — truck stops, SaaS firms, cybersecurity outfits — that are potentially on the losing side of the technological shift.